A significant event in my life took place last week and I didn’t even notice it at the time. No, not speaking at the Tomorrow’s Leaders conference — I certainly noticed that, and can report that sitting on a stage with Jimmy Manyi, Vusi Pikoli and Saki Macozoma was an experience that bordered on the surreal; I’m talking about the fact that I passed the all-important milestone of 10 000 tweets.
Compared to the 46 000 that some people have racked up, that’s nothing. I’ve been on Twitter for just over two years, which means I’m averaging 5 000 a year or about 14 a day, which isn’t much at all when you think about it. I’ve tweeted everywhere from a queue to apply for a new driver’s licence at Marlboro to the Wimpy at Hoedspruit to a lion kill in the Timbavati. (I’d have tweeted Jimmy Manyi’s speech last week too, but it would have looked weird with all those people watching.)
In the week before I passed 10 000 tweets, Twitter turned five years old. I signed up in March 2009 while I was living in Sydney, hence my rather strange Twitter handle — various iterations of Sarah Britten were not available, so I thought of the platypus I’d seen in the Taronga Zoo and named myself Anatinus, from Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Soon afterwards I returned to South Africa, where I became something of a Twitter evangelist — a twevangelist? — and discovered that not everyone was excited about it as I was. It’s hard not to feel just the tiniest bit vindicated by Twitter’s increasingly important role as a channel of influence.
An eyewitness to the shark attack in Fish Hoek broke the story on Twitter. It was on Twitter that news of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s death was first leaked and where Gareth Cliff got into so much trouble, again. It was Twitter that fuelled rumours about Nelson Mandela’s health and no doubt Twitter will continue to both break and make the news.
Through Twitter I have connected with offline friends and hooked up with new ones. Together with Facebook, Twitter is a brilliant networking tool. It’s partly thanks to Twitter that I’m tooling around Sandton in a luxury SUV. (Whenever anyone in my family gives me a hard time about the amount of time I spend online, I remind them that it’s thanks to being online that I have the Land Rover.) I was filmed for an insert for China Central TV English news because Gus Silber retweeted one of my lipstick paintings of Joburg.
Twitter lends itself perfectly to two very important drivers of online behaviour, the desire to perform and the desire to tell your own story — we’re all our own publicists now — and I will happily admit that this is a big part of its attraction for me. It’s great for so many things besides rampant narcissism, though: I get most of my news and all of my best links through Twitter, and it’s hard to beat as a dipstick into the zeitgeist. Oh, granted, those who are active on Twitter are a relatively small elite, the so-called desktop activists, but the opinions expressed in 140 characters or less have a lot more influence than opinions voiced around the braai. Twitter makes word of mouth visible, and that is its power.
Last year I wrote about South Africa’s biggest ever tweet-up for the Sunday Times Lifestyle supplement. I observed that Twitter can be the noisiest, most chaotic place in the world, and also the loneliest. That’s still true: when you tweet and nobody responds, it can feel as though you’re shouting into an echoing void.
Twitter can feel like a school playground at times, a giant corner couch in front of the TV at others. It has changed my life, and mostly for the good. Though I’ve had my phone confiscated in order to stop me from tweeting, I’m not so addicted that I will tweet while I’m having a conversation with somebody (unless, of course, they say something eminently tweetable). The benefits I enjoy far outweigh any of the problems that my virtual involvement in the lives of others — and their involvement in mine — might bring.
I tweet, therefore I am … happier.
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